01. Beach and reading intensive. I’m basically doing a book per day and the weather has been GLORIOUS. Continue reading
Tag Archives: gin
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. The Yayoi Kusama exhibition at NGV – such joy. I loved the painted fabric sculptures. And her poem, On Pumpkins. Continue reading
The Happiest Things from Things That Are Making Me Happy
It’s hard to pick out the happiest of happy things but this is my list of 2024 highlights (excluding books and holidays). Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. This week, it was announced that clothing chain Katies, is closing. A bittersweet moment. Katies was my first casual job (in the eighties) – I had desperately wished I was working at Sportsgirl or Portmans or Cherrylane but alas, it was selling elastic-waisted pants to middle-aged women, that filled my Friday nights and Saturday mornings. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. Edinburgh Book Festival (beamed all the way to me in Melbourne) – Colm Tóibín, interviewed by Caoilinn Hughes. I love how much Colm laughed at Caoilinn’s questions. He was a great sport, especially when she opened with describing him as “…Costco’s hottest product – from the aisle between the shovels and the underwear… it’s either a very, very good book or a very, very bad book.” She then continued with a five-minute rundown of his stellar career, and when she got to the end, Colm dead-panned, “Thanks for that lovely introduction Caoilinn, although you left out quite a lot…”
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The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes
This book. This magnificent book.
The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes is the story of the Flattery sisters, who were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances.
Various relatives moved in and out, looking after them in shifts. This angered and confused the girls, who resisted management, who preferred unsupervised sadness. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. Cross section of Lune’s June special – the Black Forest Cruffin. The cherry jam layer was perfection. Continue reading
Show-off holiday post – Margaret River, Western Australia
In August 2002, I won the lottery. No, not cash, but I think something better. I was allocated a mothers group (groups were formed on the basis of postcode and when your baby was born). And 22 years later, we are still close friends – we meet regularly for dinner, have weekends away, and attempt to get as many of the children as possible together for an annual photo. We have supported each other through highs and lows, and celebrated milestones. There’s always a lot of laughter.
To mark the occassion of our ‘babies’ turning 21, we took a belated trip to Wadandi Boodja Country / Margaret River in Western Australia. For seven days, we ate the best food, drank the best wine (and gin), swam at the best beaches, had the best coastal views, and did lots of sight-seeing. And saw the aurora!
The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop
In The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop, author J.B. Blackwood, takes her husband, Patrick, a famous film director, on a cruise to celebrate their anniversary. J.B. is nursing a secret – she has won a yet-to-be-announced major literary prize. A storm hits, and Patrick falls from the ship. That might sound overly dramatic, but actually, this book is a moral thriller, and the story unfolds from that point onward (and there’s a lot more to it).
In a story… the feeling of not knowing what happens next is often a thing of pleasure: the cornerstone of our delight… But the same feeling of not-knowing, as it happens in one’s real life, is rarely so pleasurable… Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy Last Week (the Taylor Version)
01. Tay Tay. It was everything. So amazing to be part of a 96,000-person-choir for over three hours (Taylor does the ‘math’ here).
But in the lead-up, there was… Continue reading